CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK

By MEL GUSSOW

Published: November 23, 1995

LOUISVILLE, Ky.—
Although Ferenc Molnar was one of the most popular and prolific playwrights of the first half of the 20th century, today he is commonly regarded as a Budapest boulevardier who wrote frothy comedies for the cafe society of his time. Molnar remains primarily an entertainer, but there was substantial evidence at a recent Actors Theater of Louisville festival to suggest that a re-evaluation of his career would be justified. Molnar possessed a mordant wit and an artfulness in mocking theatrical convention.

At the very least, he was the Hungarian equivalent of Arthur Schnitzler, a fact that his native country is celebrating. Earlier this year, Hungary presented the first International Molnar Festival. Tamas Ungvari, a professor and translator who delivered the keynote address in Budapest, set the tone in Louisville by suggesting that "like all court jesters, Molnar was a poet of despair."

Look again at "The Play's the Thing," the self-assured centerpiece of his career, and at "The Guardsman," and beneath the sure-fire comic devices one can detect laughter as a disguise for melancholy. Molnar was masterly in the artifice of illusion, which, as Mr. Ungvari pointed out, was linked with its opposite, disillusionment. Offstage the playwright eventually fell into depression. A Jew and a fervent anti-Fascist, he was to spend years (during and after World War II) in lonely, unproductive exile in New York.

In the theater, he could always indulge his fantasies. He became the arbiter of the lies of courtship and of theater. As he said, "Theater exists to lie, except in essentials." His romantic comedies are rooted in an anti-romantic environment, in which sentiment is undercut by cynicism.

For the sake of harmony, the playwright in "The Play's the Thing" can pretend that an actress's betrayal of her fiance, overheard in a hotel, is actually a rehearsal of a play, which the playwright then writes. Repeatedly these and other characters tilt with the naturalistic conventions of theater and with the idea of role playing. The actor in "The Guardsman" can test his wife's fidelity only by putting on a costume and assuming the role of his own cuckold.

In his comedies, Molnar plays with the uses of theater in theater, breaking the wall between actors and their characters. In that sense, he could be approached as a cousin to Pirandello and later to Tom Stoppard and Christopher Durang. Significantly, one of Mr. Stoppard's sprightliest adaptations is "Rough Crossing," a shaggy shipboard version of "The Play's the Thing."

Through this century, Molnar has survived in his adaptations. Many of his 42 plays were turned into films: Billy Wilder's "One, Two, Three"; "The Guardsman" in the 1931 film version starring Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne (shown during the festival); "Olympia," which became "A Breath of Scandal" with Sophia Loren. And, of course, there was "Liliom," transformed into "Carousel."

In Louisville, in addition to "The Play's the Thing" in Jon Jory's kinetic production, there was a revival of Sidney Howard's adaptation of "Olympia" (which ridicules the fusty traditions of the aristocracy) and also a trio of one-act sketches, in which women prove to be the most devious of manipulators. With Molnar, women generally have the last word. Consider the look on Miss Fontanne's face as she pretends to have known that her husband was her suitor in disguise in "The Guardsman." Her confident pose is matched by his gullibility and vanity. He craves compliments on his performance in what he calls the "first really serious part I ever played."

Necessarily, the performances of Lunt and Fontanne in the film are so elegant as to overshadow the live actors on the Actors Theater's stages. But at least two of the company's experienced professionals revealed an ease and a panache in Molnar, a willingness to allow the dialogue to propel the play: William McNulty as the virtuosic playwright in "The Play's the Thing" and Adale O'Brien as the dowager at the center of Laszlo Marton's production of "Olympia," a princess who objects to her daughter's alliance with a commoner, even though he is as dashing as any nobleman.

One reason for Molnar's durability was his remarkable inventiveness with plots, many of which derived from his own life. His comedy was frequently self-referential. Acknowledging the autobiography behind the fiction, he firmly believed that "the better disguised these confessions are, the more honest they will be." Removed from their personalized Hungarian sources, his stories can assume new character, as typified by "Liliom," and its journey into the very American "Carousel."

In a question-and-answer period at the Louisville festival, a woman asked what Molnar, as compared with Brecht, had added to the 20th century. Mr. Ungvari answered that Molnar "never wanted to add anything to the 20th century." In other words, despite his self-esteem, he had no pretension about being an innovator. But as a craftsman, he was an astute observer of relationships, in and out of marriage, and of the tricks that people play on themselves. Self-deception remained his principal theme. As Billy Wilder said, Molnar was "smooth, elegant, the best of the urbane playwrights."

Photo: Ferenc Molnar, whose plays were the subject of a recentfestival. (Actors Theater of Louisville)